{"id":384229,"date":"2021-12-21T18:10:47","date_gmt":"2021-12-21T15:10:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/how-recycling-food-could-help-save-the-planet\/"},"modified":"2021-12-21T18:10:47","modified_gmt":"2021-12-21T15:10:47","slug":"how-recycling-food-could-help-save-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/how-recycling-food-could-help-save-the-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"#How recycling food could help save the planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#How recycling food could help save the planet<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Upcycled edible waste\u2014Transformation Tomato Sauce, anyone?\u2014is here to help clean up the planet\n <\/div>\n
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\"(Illustration<\/p>\n

(Illustration by Nicole Moss)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

By now, it shouldn\u2019t be a secret that the fight against climate change requires an all-hands-on-deck app<\/a>roach, but what about all stomachs? A wave of innovative new upcycled products indicates growing corporate buy-in for diverting all manner of edible waste\u2014leftovers, discarded produce, even invasive species\u2014away from landfills and back onto our plates. Companies cashing in on the zero-waste trend are both monolith and mini: take the juice giant Ocean Spray, which in 2020 rolled out Cranberry Seeds, a new offering that upcycles a key ingredient into a nutritional product; or Montreal\u2019s Wilder Harrier, which repurposes the noted ecosystem nuisance of Asian carp into dinners\u2014for dogs. Who says consumption is always bad for the environment?<\/p>\n

Recycling may seem like something of an old-guard solution, but converting our personal digestive organs into rudimentary blue boxes to achieve emptier landfills is a relatively creative way to responsibly manage our food resources. According to research by the National Zero Waste Council, Canadians alone waste nearly 2.2 million tonnes of food each year; a 2019 report by the Toronto non-profit Second Harvest revealed that 4.82 million tonnes of food are lost at the processing and manufacturing stages. These revelations are particularly dire in light of the fact that more than five million Canadians regularly experience food insecurity, or a lack of reliable access to affordable and nutritious food.<\/p>\n

In the Guelph-Wellington region of Ontario, the SEED is a social<\/a> enterprise aimed at ameliorating that very issue. Before COVID halted, well, everything, manager Gavin Dandy says the organization had designs on a new suite of products made from surplus ingredients and sold on a sliding scale: the aptly named Transformation Tomato Sauce, Karma Ketchup and Spent Grain Bread, to be made from barley byproduct sourced from Guelph\u2019s breweries. (There are plans to revive the planned product line at some point in the future.)<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0The B.C. floods are a mere hint of what climate change could do to the food supply\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cWe see food waste as a source of food for everybody, not just people who are food-insecure,\u201d says Dandy, who notes that the SEED\u2019s annual budget has grown from $100,000 to almost $3 million in four years. \u201cThere\u2019s a huge learning curve from a logistical point of view\u2014how we set a value on this food, and how comfortable people are going to be, in general<\/a>, with buying foods made from upcycled ingredients. But [upcycling] is going to happen until it becomes the new normal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dandy is heartened that consumers are tapping into this new stream of what he calls high-quality food. This has buoyed the SEED\u2019s Upcycle Kitchen, which has distributed more than 100,000 frozen meals (priced at $9) in the past year, along with Groceries from the SEED, an online, pay-what-you-can grocery store populated with salvaged produce. \u201cThese [programs] are examples of how we\u2019re trying to avoid creating a two-tiered system; this food is for people who are not \u2018poor\u2019 or \u2018rich,\u2019 \u201d says Dandy. \u201cWe want people, all people, to have access.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Will Valley, an associate dean in the faculty of land and food systems at the University of British Columbia, the strength of the repurposed-food boom might actually be that it highlights the limitations of our current food production and distribution systems.<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0How blockchain could revolutionize food supply chains and lower\u00a0your grocery bill\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u201cI like to think of \u2018the shine in the shadow\u2019 of these types of approaches,\u201d says Valley, who categorizes food repurposing much in the same way as food banks\u2014as more of a \u201charm-reduction\u201d exercise than a necessary systemic overhaul. \u201cThe shine is definitely in us becoming acutely aware of some of our negative impacts on ecological systems, drawing folks\u2019 attention to waste and inefficiencies. But managing invasive species [like the Asian carp] by finding a new input for it doesn\u2019t address the fundamental problems our food system has: that it\u2019s extractive, commodified and reinforces profit sharing and large power conglomeration.\u201d<\/p>\n

For all his skepticism, Valley says this new wave of food ingenuity has a leg up on inventions past, in that they don\u2019t exclusively zero in on the potential for new income streams (like sexy, seed-based protein powders), but are at least working with an eye to mitigating the myriad social harms of the status quo: species migration, the destruction of biodiversity, carbon output and ever-skyrocketing grocery costs. \u201cI always say to my students that our food system isn\u2019t broken,\u201d says Valley. \u201cIt\u2019s actually working exactly how it was designed.\u201d<\/p>\n

As our economic imagination shifts gradually away from a linear, A-to-garbage model and toward a more circular one that sees the nutritional potential in more things, we will undoubtedly be forced to acknowledge that simply stuffing ourselves with salvaged produce isn\u2019t the climate quick fix we\u2019d always hoped for. The key takeaway is that we\u2019ll be fuller, but our landfills won\u2019t be. \u201cWe will all look back at the dark ages of wasting food and think, \u2018Wow, we were really dumb,\u2019 \u201d says Dandy. \u201c\u2018How could we have ever done this any other way?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0The grassroots food insecurity initiatives putting an end to the \u2018starving student\u2019\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

This article appears in print in the January 2022 issue of<\/em> Maclean\u2019s magazine with the headline, \u201cFive ways with leftovers!\u201d Subscribe to the monthly print magazine here<\/a>.<\/em>
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